Programs cost an awful lot of cash these days, and we the end user often get stuck with what should be (at best) a beta version. Let's see...interfaces programed by someone who will never use the software, the end of the printed manual, manuals (if they exist at all) written by someone who either a) has never seen the software or b) the programmer who won't use the software but knows it better than anyone else and oh its so simple a child could operate it. All of this BS boils down to somebody at the software company not doing their @$#^% job and we the end user get to pay for it--how's that for a start.
Sorry. POS software for a piece of lab equipment is not making me happy.
You're not here to argue your position, fine. Neither am I. Actually, I am only reluctantly posting as a non-AC because I'd actually like you to read what I've got to say.
The problem is that there are a large number of different positions that can be lumped under the "creationist" title. In one point of view, it forms a continuum:
Young Earth Creationist to Old Earthers
6000 years old ala Archbishop Ussher, the earth is flat, pi is exactly 3, rabbits chew their cud, etc. uber-strict literalism(yes these people exist)
6000 years old ala Archbishop Ussher, literal 7-day creationists
~10,000 years old earth, literal 7-day creationists
~10,000 years old earth, "God's Time" 7-days; ie not using our notion of time, aka Day-Age
10,000-millions years old, with either day-age or literal 7-days
Billions of years old, often using day-age terminology for creation events.
Except for the first group all of the above might incorporate evolution or big-bang theories in some modified form. Common modifyiers might be that God created "kinds" of animals (the term "kinds" usually nebulously defined, if at all) and that they evolved into the current species we see today. Stricter I suppose would be those who agree with "kinds" being created and that they adapt via microevolution (never macro-) or that they can differentiate to some degree, but only through degeneration. Big bang might be incorporated as how God created the universe, stars, planets, etc. but with some different rate than the mainstream accepts or using day-age terminology for God's forming the stars and planets, etc.
After the more or less literal creationists come different positions in theistic evolution. People here might range from "God made everything look the way science tells us to test our faith" to "evolution happens but God made people with some day-age thingie" to "evolution happens, but God guides it" to "evolution and big bang yeah, but God's so friggin smart he coded it all into the laws of nature at the start" or "I don't mix my science and religion." The first group might prefer to be called creationists whereas the others would find the term insulting.
There are of course many other variants, but that's kind of the point of this: creationism applies to a lot of different points of view which directly contradicts what you've been saying. Also, you're calling the more literalist positions ignorant the same way evolutionists call creationists of all stripes ignorant. Pot. Kettle. Black.
For a history of the creationist movement in America and how the different camps relate to each other try Ronald L. Numbers' "The Creationists." It's a little dated now (1992) but is an excellent read. The guys' an evolutionist, but Gish (of Institute for Creation Research and one of those more literal guys you'd call ignorant) gave it the thumbs up, if memory serves. As for me, I like my religion and science seperated.
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) have been used for decades as power sources for aircraft, as some of the others have mentioned. Here is some information on their construction. Basically the plutonium is in a more stable ceramic form PtO2 (the risk of plutonium isn't so much the radioactivity, it's that plutonium is incredibly toxic) formed into spheres. Each sphere is encased in iridium, and a stack of these is in graphite. Suffice to say there's more construction on top of this, but the whole module is designed to withstand reentry by itself, and I believe are supposed to take a powered descent (rocket takes off, does a 180 and slams into the ground with engines still burning).
1000 ft/sec * 3600 sec/hour * 12in/ft * 2.54cm/1in * 1km/1x10e5 cm = 1097 km/hour. Or equal to 0.3048 km/sec. Check out convert-me.com for all your unit conversion needs.
Naturally any object slows down if there's nothing acting on it except friction and I wouldn't try using a pellet gun much past 50 yards, but the rifle velocities I got from loadammo and according to them the muzzle velocity of a.223 is 3330 ft/sec and 2865 at 100 yards. I don't have a value handy for the.223 at 1000 ft, but I find it very hard to believe that it would drop to 333ft/sec in only another 700 feet.
This blowing things up reminds me of the Survival Research Labs. Big pseudo-military machines running about and causing destruction and mayhem, like the Pitching Machine? I'd love to see any machine that can huck 2x4's at 120 mph. Anyone been lucky enough to see a show?
Some Daisy airguns claim 1000 fps, which is 1097 or so km/h. At 100 yards, a 0.223 (same as in our standard infantry rifle) moves at 2865 fps or 3144 km/h. Granted there's a lot more to lethality than speed. How big the object you're pushing at some poor bastard (kinetic energy = 1/2 mass * velocity^2, of course) matters a lot, as does what the bullet does once it's there. A hollow point leaves a much nastier wound than a solid bullet, all other things being equal.
What I want to know is how they manage to prevent the aluminum ring from flying apart at high speeds. Some of the fastest rifle rounds have that problem, and the railgun's supposedly even faster.
Re:my question to anyone who can answer it...
on
Examining Influenza
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· Score: 2, Informative
Probably not. I'm not a virologist but it wouldn't necessarily be enough to eradicate the disease among humans only. Some (many?) virii have the ability to infect multiple species, for example the West Nile virus can infect humans, horses, and crows. Also I remember years ago when I was an undergrad looking at a cladogram following the evolutionary phylogeny of the AIDS virus. At that time there were only a couple hundred different virii but they targeted more than one species. Virii mutate, so its possible under odd circumstances that they occasionally jump species, so a related influenza, AIDS, etc. could reinfect us. Little bastards.
It's quite simple. There are several labs/companies out there that are attempting to make biosensors out of members of the green fluorescent protein family (of the green fluorescent bunny fame). This is done by introducing random and/or specific mutations to the gene encoding the fluorescent protein in the hopes of making it able to translate some biologically important phenomenon such as pH, redox levels, various metal ion levels (there's an especially slick one out there for detecting calcium levels, for example) into a detectable fluorescence signal. Naturally this takes a hell of a lot of work and the people who do this want to be compensated for their efforts, hence patents.
Now what about an unmodified, naturally occuring gene? Well, around about 1994 or 95 people started using green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a tool in cell biology and now if you do a search on PubMed you get 8661 articles. That's one incredibly useful little protein tool. Now in 1999 a new fluorescent protein DsRed was discovered, and it was cool. Being red, it was easier to see in cells which fluoresce in the blue and green ranges by themselves which made it valuable as a tool. Now these guys who found the organism, had the moment of genius to look for a fluorescent protein, found it, and made it all work naturally wanted to be compensated for it. Is this wrong?
After all, 40 or so years ago guys would get "suntans" by standing in front of the microwave dishes at sensor stations in Alaska. Until they realized that it was killing them rather quickly. Mind you much higher power and duration than this new weapon thingie.
I think now that the Ft. Bragg murders have been attributed to the use of the antimalarial drug Lariam (aka mefloquine). It apparently has the nasty side effects of making users of it less able to control destructive and/or suicidal behavior and thoughts. This once came up when I was talking to a guy who used to work at the same place as me. He was given mefloquine by his doctor prior to a trip to SE Asia. He said that he had random thoughts pop up like "If I took this razor blade to my hand, I could see all the musculature in my hand just like in an anatomy book." He said he felt safe only if he had to concentrate on something like work; at home to focus on something he took to building models. Effects lasted for about six months and there wasn't anything to do about it but wait. Anyway, that's what happened to a well-adjusted and happy individual, as opposed to someone who just got out of a combat zone and went home to a wife that wanted a divorce like at Ft. Bragg. Ah the power of chemistry.
What's going on with HP/Compaq/whatever? The best calculator they've got is the HP 48GX, which was the top-of-the-line new model when I bought my 48SX in 1993. It used to be that if you were an engineer or scientist, you owned an HP period. No exceptions unless you were one of the old farts whose slide rule could only be taken from their cold, dead hand. Now these younger students are showing up with these TI POS's and won't touch an HP--RPN is beyond them. Not so bad since no one else will use my (superior) calculator, but what am I going to do when my HP finally croaks? I don't want to use anything but RPN, damnit!
Re:Sounds like a superhero/villain origin story.
on
Visiting the Big Bang
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· Score: 2
...and able to graduate with a Ph.D. in less than four years!
The majority of the nonstandard amino acids present in protein come about by post-translational modification; they start off as a standard amino acid and either are modified by another protein or are simply unstable in their environment as a standard amino acid. Oxidation of cysteines to cysteine sulfenic (-inic, or -onic) acids is one example, phosphorylation of tyrosines is another. Selenomethionine and selenocysteine are sometimes examples of this as well (enzymatic replacement of the sulfur with selenium), although in some special cases are coded in the DNA as specifically being selenomethionine and selenocysteine as opposed to methionine and cysteine. What the group at Scripps did was engineer E. coli to change how it recognizes a codon or a set of codons, presumably ones that E. coli rarely uses (can't find the original article, damnit!) and incorporate a new amino acid, p-aminophenylalanine in place of whatever normal E. coli put in a polypeptide before when it hit that codon. This is cool because previous efforts used modified growth media to "trick" the bugs into putting something similar in a protein in place of a standard amino acid whereas here the bugs are using 21 (23 if you're being tight with your definitions and including selenocysteine and selenomethionine) amino acids. The goal of the study is to try and look at why we've ~all got 20 (22) amino acids and not some other number. I wish them luck on that one, but at least they've got a start on the tools necessary to figure that out.
Anthrax is a complex of three proteins: anthrax protective antigen, edema factor, and lethal factor. Anthrax works by binding onto the surface of a cell, then an endogenous protease cleaves the protective antigen, which allows the lethal factor to enter the cell where it acts as a protease chopping up the cell's proteins (notably those involved with cellular signaling) which kills the cell. The authors of the above study have replaced the old cleavage site in the anthrax protective antigen with one that is recognized and specifically cut by urokinase, which is dramaticly upregulated in cells that are cancerous. The result is that the anthrax toxin binds cells but is only cleaved by urokinase, not by whatever was cutting it before. So cells that are making lots of urokinase (cancer cells) cut more of the anthrax protective antigen which allows more of the anthrax lethal factor to enter the cell and chop up more proteins, which kills the cell. The down side is that all cells produce some level of urokinase, so a few noncanerous cells will also be killed by the anthrax toxin, but this sounds like it could be less than traditional chemotherapy. Anyway, this is an incredibly slick idea for combating cancer!
The authors of the study have managed to modify the anthrax toxin (or one of its associated proteins?? I'm still reading the article) to specifically target the toxin to urokinase, a protein that is expressed on the cell surface. In cancerous cells, expression of this protein is dramaticly increased so the modified anthrax toxin will preferentially bind to and kill cancerous cells. Like any chemotherapy, some noncancerous cells will likely also be hit by the poison but hopefully less than in traditional chemotherapy.
I live in Oregon, so I'm used to some pretty boneheaded ideas but this one takes the cake. Fortunately it runs afoul of a little thing called the 4th Amendment. While the state is in dire financial straits--so bad that a 4-day school week was investigated as a cost cutting measure--a much more obvious fix to the budget crisis than this moronic measure would be to readjust our income tax. Oregon has a defecto flat-tax as the brackets haven't been readjusted since the 30's. A flat tax is naturally a recipe for ruin because in order to pay for things like roads and schools the tax has to be set quite high which means the working poor and middle class have less disposable income to put back into the economy.
Well just as long as no one steals my idea for fermented meat alcoholic beverages...Okay, I think that one's safe.
Other reasons for dietary rules
on
Lab-Grown Steak
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· Score: 1
Health isn't the only reason various cultures/religions have developed dietary rules. Saw on PBS that some of the South American tribes had strict divisions of what they could and could not eat that often were entirely different from a neighboring tribe. The main reason seemed to be for tribal identification, although one must also think it may have come about for alterior reasons: division of resources might have lessened inter-tribal warfare a bit.
Lots of dietary rules don't make much sense anymore, though. Take for example people starving in India with cows and cow shit everywhere, or how we don't eat cats (mmm...roof rabbit) in the States. I hate cats.
Various other odd materials were also used by some of the middle eastern armies. Paper armor for example was pretty good (take an axe to your phonebook!) but it of course sucked if it either got wet or got hit with some boiling oil. European armies used some quilted armor in the Crusades and was a match for the Arab's light bows. They started calling the soldiers wearing the quilted armor porcupines because of all the arrows sticking out of them. But closer to the topic, I'd just love to see an M1 Abrams outfitted in plush silk armor. Preferably pink.
Yeah it's gone, but not before my boss while on vacation called my lab from it. Luckily there was one person not playing hooky who was there to answer it. I have a goofy boss. Anyway another site on it can be found here.
It's interesting that you put so much weight on the Supreme Court's rulings on the 2nd Amendment when they have only ruled on it twice. Also one must make note of how the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals looked at the 2nd recently. They decided (in opposition to 200 years of jurisprudence) that "the people" is in fact a collective term, ie "the state" as in the state has the right to bear arms. Of course this quickly becomes ridiculous when we look at other instances of "the people" clearly meaning the individual: most notably the 1st Amendment. Or maybe with the 4th amendment: I'm sure that the state of California is quite relieved that it is not subject to unreasonable search and seizure by what, the state of Texas? Obviously if the case were so cut and dried that we do not have the right as individuals to bear arms the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals would not have ruled in this asinine way as this ruling can now be used as a basis to strip rights from individuals and give them to the state if in the definition of that right the wording uses "the people."
I showed this to my roommate who has had many a crap job;) including honeydipper (cleaning out the nasty space under an outhouse when it gets full) and some sewer-side plumbing. He looked at those robots and said that they had a snowball's chance in hell of working in a real world situation. I trust his opinion over the engineers: exactly how many outhouses and sewers have they been in?
This site reminded me strongly of the main train station in east Berlin I visited back in '95...Ostbahnhof? Actually, the stations in this site were in better shape than the Ostbahnhof was then....
Another site that has similar information about places you're not supposed to go is www.infiltration.org. Ah, running around steam tunnels back when I was an undergrad....
Slashdot Mirror
Programs cost an awful lot of cash these days, and we the end user often get stuck with what should be (at best) a beta version. Let's see...interfaces programed by someone who will never use the software, the end of the printed manual, manuals (if they exist at all) written by someone who either a) has never seen the software or b) the programmer who won't use the software but knows it better than anyone else and oh its so simple a child could operate it. All of this BS boils down to somebody at the software company not doing their @$#^% job and we the end user get to pay for it--how's that for a start.
Sorry. POS software for a piece of lab equipment is not making me happy.
You're not here to argue your position, fine. Neither am I. Actually, I am only reluctantly posting as a non-AC because I'd actually like you to read what I've got to say.
The problem is that there are a large number of different positions that can be lumped under the "creationist" title. In one point of view, it forms a continuum:
Young Earth Creationist to Old Earthers
6000 years old ala Archbishop Ussher, the earth is flat, pi is exactly 3, rabbits chew their cud, etc. uber-strict literalism(yes these people exist)
6000 years old ala Archbishop Ussher, literal 7-day creationists
~10,000 years old earth, literal 7-day creationists
~10,000 years old earth, "God's Time" 7-days; ie not using our notion of time, aka Day-Age
10,000-millions years old, with either day-age or literal 7-days
Billions of years old, often using day-age terminology for creation events.
Except for the first group all of the above might incorporate evolution or big-bang theories in some modified form. Common modifyiers might be that God created "kinds" of animals (the term "kinds" usually nebulously defined, if at all) and that they evolved into the current species we see today. Stricter I suppose would be those who agree with "kinds" being created and that they adapt via microevolution (never macro-) or that they can differentiate to some degree, but only through degeneration. Big bang might be incorporated as how God created the universe, stars, planets, etc. but with some different rate than the mainstream accepts or using day-age terminology for God's forming the stars and planets, etc.
After the more or less literal creationists come different positions in theistic evolution. People here might range from "God made everything look the way science tells us to test our faith" to "evolution happens but God made people with some day-age thingie" to "evolution happens, but God guides it" to "evolution and big bang yeah, but God's so friggin smart he coded it all into the laws of nature at the start" or "I don't mix my science and religion." The first group might prefer to be called creationists whereas the others would find the term insulting.
There are of course many other variants, but that's kind of the point of this: creationism applies to a lot of different points of view which directly contradicts what you've been saying. Also, you're calling the more literalist positions ignorant the same way evolutionists call creationists of all stripes ignorant. Pot. Kettle. Black.
For a history of the creationist movement in America and how the different camps relate to each other try Ronald L. Numbers' "The Creationists." It's a little dated now (1992) but is an excellent read. The guys' an evolutionist, but Gish (of Institute for Creation Research and one of those more literal guys you'd call ignorant) gave it the thumbs up, if memory serves. As for me, I like my religion and science seperated.
"...some members of the Salt Lake Astronomical Society want to drop bowling balls from airplanes..."
Who doesn't?
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) have been used for decades as power sources for aircraft, as some of the others have mentioned. Here is some information on their construction. Basically the plutonium is in a more stable ceramic form PtO2 (the risk of plutonium isn't so much the radioactivity, it's that plutonium is incredibly toxic) formed into spheres. Each sphere is encased in iridium, and a stack of these is in graphite. Suffice to say there's more construction on top of this, but the whole module is designed to withstand reentry by itself, and I believe are supposed to take a powered descent (rocket takes off, does a 180 and slams into the ground with engines still burning).
1000 ft/sec * 3600 sec/hour * 12in/ft * 2.54cm/1in * 1km/1x10e5 cm = 1097 km/hour. Or equal to 0.3048 km/sec. Check out convert-me.com for all your unit conversion needs. .223 is 3330 ft/sec and 2865 at 100 yards. I don't have a value handy for the .223 at 1000 ft, but I find it very hard to believe that it would drop to 333ft/sec in only another 700 feet.
Naturally any object slows down if there's nothing acting on it except friction and I wouldn't try using a pellet gun much past 50 yards, but the rifle velocities I got from loadammo and according to them the muzzle velocity of a
This blowing things up reminds me of the Survival Research Labs. Big pseudo-military machines running about and causing destruction and mayhem, like the Pitching Machine? I'd love to see any machine that can huck 2x4's at 120 mph. Anyone been lucky enough to see a show?
Some Daisy airguns claim 1000 fps, which is 1097 or so km/h. At 100 yards, a 0.223 (same as in our standard infantry rifle) moves at 2865 fps or 3144 km/h. Granted there's a lot more to lethality than speed. How big the object you're pushing at some poor bastard (kinetic energy = 1/2 mass * velocity^2, of course) matters a lot, as does what the bullet does once it's there. A hollow point leaves a much nastier wound than a solid bullet, all other things being equal.
What I want to know is how they manage to prevent the aluminum ring from flying apart at high speeds. Some of the fastest rifle rounds have that problem, and the railgun's supposedly even faster.
Probably not. I'm not a virologist but it wouldn't necessarily be enough to eradicate the disease among humans only. Some (many?) virii have the ability to infect multiple species, for example the West Nile virus can infect humans, horses, and crows. Also I remember years ago when I was an undergrad looking at a cladogram following the evolutionary phylogeny of the AIDS virus. At that time there were only a couple hundred different virii but they targeted more than one species. Virii mutate, so its possible under odd circumstances that they occasionally jump species, so a related influenza, AIDS, etc. could reinfect us. Little bastards.
It's quite simple. There are several labs/companies out there that are attempting to make biosensors out of members of the green fluorescent protein family (of the green fluorescent bunny fame). This is done by introducing random and/or specific mutations to the gene encoding the fluorescent protein in the hopes of making it able to translate some biologically important phenomenon such as pH, redox levels, various metal ion levels (there's an especially slick one out there for detecting calcium levels, for example) into a detectable fluorescence signal. Naturally this takes a hell of a lot of work and the people who do this want to be compensated for their efforts, hence patents.
Now what about an unmodified, naturally occuring gene? Well, around about 1994 or 95 people started using green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a tool in cell biology and now if you do a search on PubMed you get 8661 articles. That's one incredibly useful little protein tool. Now in 1999 a new fluorescent protein DsRed was discovered, and it was cool. Being red, it was easier to see in cells which fluoresce in the blue and green ranges by themselves which made it valuable as a tool. Now these guys who found the organism, had the moment of genius to look for a fluorescent protein, found it, and made it all work naturally wanted to be compensated for it. Is this wrong?
Then there are the Amish near where I grew up who refused to use buttons--because they were too "worldly."
After all, 40 or so years ago guys would get "suntans" by standing in front of the microwave dishes at sensor stations in Alaska. Until they realized that it was killing them rather quickly. Mind you much higher power and duration than this new weapon thingie.
I think now that the Ft. Bragg murders have been attributed to the use of the antimalarial drug Lariam (aka mefloquine). It apparently has the nasty side effects of making users of it less able to control destructive and/or suicidal behavior and thoughts. This once came up when I was talking to a guy who used to work at the same place as me. He was given mefloquine by his doctor prior to a trip to SE Asia. He said that he had random thoughts pop up like "If I took this razor blade to my hand, I could see all the musculature in my hand just like in an anatomy book." He said he felt safe only if he had to concentrate on something like work; at home to focus on something he took to building models. Effects lasted for about six months and there wasn't anything to do about it but wait. Anyway, that's what happened to a well-adjusted and happy individual, as opposed to someone who just got out of a combat zone and went home to a wife that wanted a divorce like at Ft. Bragg. Ah the power of chemistry.
What's going on with HP/Compaq/whatever? The best calculator they've got is the HP 48GX, which was the top-of-the-line new model when I bought my 48SX in 1993. It used to be that if you were an engineer or scientist, you owned an HP period. No exceptions unless you were one of the old farts whose slide rule could only be taken from their cold, dead hand. Now these younger students are showing up with these TI POS's and won't touch an HP--RPN is beyond them. Not so bad since no one else will use my (superior) calculator, but what am I going to do when my HP finally croaks? I don't want to use anything but RPN, damnit!
...and able to graduate with a Ph.D. in less than four years!
The majority of the nonstandard amino acids present in protein come about by post-translational modification; they start off as a standard amino acid and either are modified by another protein or are simply unstable in their environment as a standard amino acid. Oxidation of cysteines to cysteine sulfenic (-inic, or -onic) acids is one example, phosphorylation of tyrosines is another. Selenomethionine and selenocysteine are sometimes examples of this as well (enzymatic replacement of the sulfur with selenium), although in some special cases are coded in the DNA as specifically being selenomethionine and selenocysteine as opposed to methionine and cysteine. What the group at Scripps did was engineer E. coli to change how it recognizes a codon or a set of codons, presumably ones that E. coli rarely uses (can't find the original article, damnit!) and incorporate a new amino acid, p-aminophenylalanine in place of whatever normal E. coli put in a polypeptide before when it hit that codon. This is cool because previous efforts used modified growth media to "trick" the bugs into putting something similar in a protein in place of a standard amino acid whereas here the bugs are using 21 (23 if you're being tight with your definitions and including selenocysteine and selenomethionine) amino acids. The goal of the study is to try and look at why we've ~all got 20 (22) amino acids and not some other number. I wish them luck on that one, but at least they've got a start on the tools necessary to figure that out.
Anthrax is a complex of three proteins: anthrax protective antigen, edema factor, and lethal factor. Anthrax works by binding onto the surface of a cell, then an endogenous protease cleaves the protective antigen, which allows the lethal factor to enter the cell where it acts as a protease chopping up the cell's proteins (notably those involved with cellular signaling) which kills the cell. The authors of the above study have replaced the old cleavage site in the anthrax protective antigen with one that is recognized and specifically cut by urokinase, which is dramaticly upregulated in cells that are cancerous. The result is that the anthrax toxin binds cells but is only cleaved by urokinase, not by whatever was cutting it before. So cells that are making lots of urokinase (cancer cells) cut more of the anthrax protective antigen which allows more of the anthrax lethal factor to enter the cell and chop up more proteins, which kills the cell. The down side is that all cells produce some level of urokinase, so a few noncanerous cells will also be killed by the anthrax toxin, but this sounds like it could be less than traditional chemotherapy. Anyway, this is an incredibly slick idea for combating cancer!
The authors of the study have managed to modify the anthrax toxin (or one of its associated proteins?? I'm still reading the article) to specifically target the toxin to urokinase, a protein that is expressed on the cell surface. In cancerous cells, expression of this protein is dramaticly increased so the modified anthrax toxin will preferentially bind to and kill cancerous cells. Like any chemotherapy, some noncancerous cells will likely also be hit by the poison but hopefully less than in traditional chemotherapy.
I live in Oregon, so I'm used to some pretty boneheaded ideas but this one takes the cake. Fortunately it runs afoul of a little thing called the 4th Amendment. While the state is in dire financial straits--so bad that a 4-day school week was investigated as a cost cutting measure--a much more obvious fix to the budget crisis than this moronic measure would be to readjust our income tax. Oregon has a defecto flat-tax as the brackets haven't been readjusted since the 30's. A flat tax is naturally a recipe for ruin because in order to pay for things like roads and schools the tax has to be set quite high which means the working poor and middle class have less disposable income to put back into the economy.
Well just as long as no one steals my idea for fermented meat alcoholic beverages...Okay, I think that one's safe.
Lots of dietary rules don't make much sense anymore, though. Take for example people starving in India with cows and cow shit everywhere, or how we don't eat cats (mmm...roof rabbit) in the States. I hate cats.
Various other odd materials were also used by some of the middle eastern armies. Paper armor for example was pretty good (take an axe to your phonebook!) but it of course sucked if it either got wet or got hit with some boiling oil. European armies used some quilted armor in the Crusades and was a match for the Arab's light bows. They started calling the soldiers wearing the quilted armor porcupines because of all the arrows sticking out of them. But closer to the topic, I'd just love to see an M1 Abrams outfitted in plush silk armor. Preferably pink.
Yeah it's gone, but not before my boss while on vacation called my lab from it. Luckily there was one person not playing hooky who was there to answer it. I have a goofy boss. Anyway another site on it can be found here.
It's interesting that you put so much weight on the Supreme Court's rulings on the 2nd Amendment when they have only ruled on it twice. Also one must make note of how the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals looked at the 2nd recently. They decided (in opposition to 200 years of jurisprudence) that "the people" is in fact a collective term, ie "the state" as in the state has the right to bear arms. Of course this quickly becomes ridiculous when we look at other instances of "the people" clearly meaning the individual: most notably the 1st Amendment. Or maybe with the 4th amendment: I'm sure that the state of California is quite relieved that it is not subject to unreasonable search and seizure by what, the state of Texas? Obviously if the case were so cut and dried that we do not have the right as individuals to bear arms the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals would not have ruled in this asinine way as this ruling can now be used as a basis to strip rights from individuals and give them to the state if in the definition of that right the wording uses "the people."
I showed this to my roommate who has had many a crap job ;) including honeydipper (cleaning out the nasty space under an outhouse when it gets full) and some sewer-side plumbing. He looked at those robots and said that they had a snowball's chance in hell of working in a real world situation. I trust his opinion over the engineers: exactly how many outhouses and sewers have they been in?
Another site that has similar information about places you're not supposed to go is www.infiltration.org. Ah, running around steam tunnels back when I was an undergrad....